Tag Archives: genre

Introducing Challenge Panel Member: Alice Deignan

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Our latest Challenge Panel introduction comes from Professor Alice Deignan via the University of Leeds. Read her brief autobiography below.

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I am Professor of Applied Linguistics in the School of Education, University of Leeds, UK. I come from a language teaching background and many of my current students are language teachers. My interest in corpora dates back to my days as an MA student at Birmingham University where I was introduced to the Cobuild project in corpus lexicography. I was fascinated by the possibilities that corpus work opened up, and when I finished my MA, I joined the project as a lexicographer. I later worked for the project as a consultant on pragmatics and then as an author. Around the same time, I also became very interested in metaphors and other kinds of figurative language, partly because of the difficulties that my students had with this kind of expression.

I studied part time for a PhD, in which I used the Bank of English at Cobuild to explore the predictions that Conceptual Metaphor Theory makes for language patterns. I saw that the corpus could be cherry-picked to select examples that were completely consistent with the theory. However as a lexicographer I’d been trained to analyse entire concordances, or very large random samples of them, and to account for all the data. I was a huge fan of Conceptual Metaphor Theory so I was surprised to find that this rigorous analysis turned up patterns in the corpus that were not predicted by the theory, and needed other explanations. I later wrote up my findings as a book ‘Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics’ (Benjamins 2005).

More recently, I have become very interested in variations in figurative language across different genres and registers, and together with Jeannette Littlemore and Elena Semino wrote ‘Figurative Language, Genre and Register’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013). One of my studies for the book compared figurative language use in science research articles with their popularisations. This has led me to a broader interest in the language of science, especially as experienced by young people, an issue that has societal importance well beyond theories of language use. I am currently exploring this area with colleagues who work with secondary school pupils. I am also exploring the connections between collocation and different kinds of and degrees of metaphoricity.

Did you miss our previous introductions? Click through to the Challenge Panel page to see profiles, and check back soon for updates.

Exploring the grammar of Netflix in The Atlantic

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A journalist with The Atlantic has used AntConc — a concordance program by CASS affiliate scholar Laurence Anthony — to deconstruct and reconstruct the grammar of Netflix genre descriptions.

“If you use Netflix, you’ve probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it’s absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s? If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized genres” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?”

By creating the genres loaded into Netflix as a corpus, Alexis C. Madrigal was able to identify patterns in the data, and to autogenerate new theoretical genres based on popular adjectives and subjects, such as:

  • Deep Sea Father-and-Son Period Pieces Based on Real Life Set in the Middle East For Kids
  • Assassination Bounty-Hunter Secret Society Dramas Based on Books Set in Europe About Fame For Ages 8 to 10
  • Post-Apocalyptic Comedies About Friendship

To read more about this application of a concordancer and corpus linguistic methods, as well as the resulting interview with Todd Yellin, Netflix’s VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix’s tagging system, read the full article on The Atlantic: How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood

 

New book: “Figurative Language, Genre and Register”

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Researchers investigating figurative language using corpora will find this new volume extremely helpful:

Deignan, A., Littlemore, J. & Semino, E. (2013) Figurative language, genre and register. Cambridge Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 9781107009431

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This book brings together discourse analysis and corpus linguistics in a cutting-edge study of figurative language in spoken and written discourse. The authors explore a diverse range of communities from chronic pain sufferers to nursery staff to present a detailed framework for the analysis of figurative language. The reader is shown how figurative language is used between members of these communities to construct their own ‘world view’, and how this can change with a shift in perspective – for example, when nursery staff are talking to each other about children in their care, and when they are communicating with the children’s parents. Figurative language is shown to be pervasive and inescapable, but it is also suggested that it varies significantly across genres. Hence, the use of figurative language can both help and hinder communication, especially when boundaries between genres and discourse communities are crossed.

Download a sample chapter or visit the Cambridge University Press page for author bios and information on ordering.